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07/20/2010

In his part history of Bulgarian literature/part survey of the career of contemporary Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, Dimiter Kenarov remarks that to appreciate Gospopdinov "one does not have to be Bulgarian, or to know the name of the Bulgarian president" and that his novel Natural Novel (Dalkey Archive) "has all the necessary visas to travel comfortably between countries and translations without losing the identity of its vision." In his review of the novel, J. M. Tyree echoes this assertion of Gospodinov's transnational appeal by suggesting that Natural Novel "belongs more to the cosmopolitan postmodern aesthetic of Italo Calvino than its native locale" and that "the novel could have been set almost anywhere."

It was my experience of Natural Novel as well that a distinctively Bulgarian milieu seemed curiously absent, although Bulgarian readers would surely be more readily able to identify those elements of such a milieu that are depicted. And it was also my experience that the novel had something in common with the work of a writer like Calvino, or with the "postmodern aesthetic" in general. It may be the second impression that is partly responsible for the first, but in Natural Novel, postmodernism is applied so lightly that its "cosmopolitan" effect can't really fully account for the fact the novel "could have been set almost anywhere."

Natural Novel shares this characteristic with two other works of Eastern European fiction I have read in the past few years, Magdalena Tulli's Flaw and Dumitru Tsepeneag's Vain Art of the Fugue. Since my acquaintance with contemporary fiction from Eastern European countries is limited, I do not want to make generalizations about it--although Kenarov's essay does seem to suggest that it is precisely Gospodinov's "cosmopolitan" approach that makes him a significant figure among current Bulgarian writers--nor could I offer any especially keen insights that would explain the abstracted, "anywhere" quality of these three books, even if there is some cultural or literary factor that unites them. What immediately comes to mind as a possible explanation is a post-Communist rejection of "realism" as a whole, including but not restricted to the "socialist" variety, which entails a movement away from local details and cultural "texture" and, perhaps, an embrace of the Western decadence of postmodernism.

Although I enjoyed all three of these novels, most recently Natural Novel, their accessibility "between countries and translations" ultimately leaves me feeling ambivalent about them and about the "globalization" of fiction more generally. On the one hand, their metafictional strategies are appealing to me, as a reader sympathetic to this postmodern variant, but on the other hand I also find the thinness of detail and texture vaguely unsastisfying. One of the arguments often made on behalf of translated fiction is precisely that it provides us an avenue of increased acquaintance with "foreign" cultures, but a book like Natural Novel often seems to reflect our own culture back to American readers, both in literal references to American culture ("Remember how in Pulp Fiction Bruce Willis goes back to get his watch and decides to toast Pop Tarts, while Travolta is reading in the john?" one man asks another in a conversation about toilets) and in its fragmented and self-conscious narrative devices, most of which seem to me to derive primarily from American postmodernism--indeed, while writers like Calvino and Borges are among the original inspirations of literary postmodernism, that inspiration was initially and most fully expressed in postmodern American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Natural Novel finally reads to me most like a synthesis of the narrative manner and techniques of writers such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Gilbert Sorrentino.

This familiarity perhaps helps Gospodinov or Tulli more easily find English-language readers, but I wonder if these writers aren't being translated in the first place because their work is more likely to attract such an audience as exists for translations. A work like Natural Novel certainly offers itself to a critic who must read it in translation (namely me) in a more readily accessible way--if nothing else, I have a working knowledge of postmodern devices and the postmodern sensibility--but I can't think that a globalized fiction that makes it less necessary to attend to Bulgarian or Polish or Rumanian as literary languages with their own distinctive features, or that mitigates the effort to understand an "alien" culture, is altogether a good thing.

03/03/2010

In her recent consideration of Dalkey Archive's anthology, Best European Fiction2010, Ruth Franklin wonders:

Other than the language in which they write, is there anything that unites [writers such as Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and Nathan Englander]—all of whom have spent long periods of their lives living in places other than the United States—as definably American?

This immediately seems to me rather insipid. In taking full measure of all writers' work, "the language in which they write" is everything. If the language is English, then whatever is "definably American" about the work can only reach us through the Americanized version of this language. (Luckily the reach of English into many countries and cultures gives us Americans additional direct access to the work of many non-American writers, although I would still maintain that American readers are going to respond most fully to American fiction simply because they "know" the language as inflected by American culture, just as Australians will respond most strongly to Australian fiction. This does not seem to me a matter of "preferring" one's national literature to translated literature. It's simply a matter of fact.) As to what else might mark a writer as "definably American": Who cares? It's an exercise for an American Studies scholar, perhaps, but otherwise not a question relevant to the our encounter with the text.

I have written before that I feel comfortable engaging in literary criticism, at least that form of it I generally favor, close reading, only of English-language fiction or poetry. I am not able to get close enough to do a close reading of translations, since I can't be sure the text in front of me is an adequate realization of the original--indeed, I know it's not, as the only adequate realization would be the original. I cannot immerse myself in the language of the text, only the translator's rendering of the text in another language, and I don't see how a critical reading of this text would be a fair judgment of the writer as a writer. It's literally not his/her writing.

I experience this dilemma not as a reason to elevate literature in English above that produced in other languages but as a reason to focus my critical energies (although not necessarily all of my reading time) on work that I think I can assess accurately. I experience it ultimately as a forfeited opportunity to widen my own reading horizons, a result of my inability to pick up languages easily, or at least to learn one well enough to read an untranslated text with any degree of confidence I am "getting it." There's certainly enough that I can get from a translated text--most of its formal qualities and a general comprehesion of character or setting or theme, etc.--to make reading translations worthwhile, but I would venture into extended critical analysis of a translated work only when I think its most important qualities obviously enough survive the translation--as I did most recently with Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.

According to Franklin, "There’s something a little bit ridiculous about continuing to use nationality as a primary label for writers now that literary culture has gone truly global." Nationality itself, perhaps so, but there's nothing ridiculous at all about using national language as "a primary label for writers." There may be an increasingly shared "sensibility" among "global" writers, but finally the way in which that sensibility is embodied in the available resources of the writer's medium--the particular language in which he/she writes--can't simply be ignored. To the extent it is being ignored, both in the commentary about Best European Fiction (where language differences among the included writers themselves are also being subsumed to the imperatives of the "global") and in discussions of translation in general, a fundamental fact about literature is simply being elided. I can't see that it does a writer from any country any good to encourage readers to think that language can harmlessly be tossed into a melting pot of flavorless "international influences" and be served up as a stew.

12/21/2009

It seems to me that almost all of the reviewers who found fault with Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones--some of them quite harshly--failed to take sufficiently into account the effects and implications of its origin in the first-person narration of its protagonist. They made the mistake of imputing to the author, or to the author's "intentions," ideas that are properly confined to the discourse of the narrator.

The first step in a critically generous assessment of a work of fiction has to be to engage with the work on its own embodied terms, as far as those terms can be apprehended by the discerning critic. When a novel or story is presented as a first-person narrative--related either by the protagonist or some other subsidiary or observing character--this ought to be a sign that the account we are given is rooted in the perceptions, the language, and the assumptions of the narrator. All first-person narrators are to this degree "unreliable," although some third-person narrators might be unreliable as well (if such a narrator hews especially close to the perspective of the characters on whose behalf the narrator essentially speaks) and sometimes reliability is mostly irrelevant. Especially when a character is as self-involved, not to mention self-deceived, as Maximilien Aue, the true-believing Nazi SS officer who narrates his war experiences in The Kindly Ones, any critical commentary must acknowledge that "meaning" or "theme" (and even at times "style") are conditioned by the limits of the narrator's perspective.

One has to assume that in creating a narrator with such extreme limitations as Dr. Aue, Littell is fully aware of building in a space for ambiguity and uncertainty, of presenting us with a character whose every utterance has to be considered potentially compromised by context. One might assume further that Littell is posing to readers an explicit challenge precisely to scrutinize the text in this way, not to take it as the author's own account of Nazism or to judge it by standards inappropriate to the kind of work it is. Thus when Laila Lalami complains that the reader of The Kindly Ones is not "drawn into the narrative by the beauty of the language, a masterful use of point of view, or an intriguing personal life against which the monstrosity of the main character could be highlighted," she implies the novel would be less objectionable as a portrait of a "monster" if instead of its "plodding style" it employed beautiful language, unified the point of view so that the narrator seemed less dissociated, or made Aue's personal life more "intriguing" and less repellent. She is asking it to be something other than itself, something less troublesome.

For a text authored by an SS bureaucrat to exhibit "beautiful" language would defy belief even more considerably than does Aue's ability to show up at every important stage of the Final Solution, which Lalami describes as "unrealistic." If ever a novel justifies a "plodding style," The Kindly Ones is it, since it so accurately reflects Aue's bureaucratic soul. I confess I do not find this novel lacking "a single narrative consciousness" as Lalami sums up her problem with Littell's handling of point of view, although I agree that Aue's narration does modulate in tone. This seems to me, however, a consequence of the fact that Aue's "narrative consciousness" inherently veers from "confessional" to "argumentative," etc., not that this fragmentation is a flaw in the use of point of view. Narrative consciousness is finally unified by Aue's particular kind of fragmented consciousness, although even if we found only disunity in the expression of point of view, I'm not sure why that in itself should be regarded as an aesthetic failure. It could be argued that "unity" of consciousness in fiction is actually a false representation of actual human consciousness, which is likely much more disunifed than we want to think.

That Maximilien Aue's "personal life" is so distasteful as to make his story doubly monstrous was a common reaction among reviewers of The Kindly Ones. David Gates asserts in his New York Times Book Review assessment that "Aue is simply too much of a freak, and his supposed childhood trauma too specialized and contrived, for us to take him seriously," while Michiko Kakutani adds that "Aue is clearly a deranged creature, and his madness turns his story into a voyeuristic spectacle." Ruth Franklin scoffs that the novel's "utterly persuasive evocation of depravity" could be taken "as a sign of achievement." Franklin's review in particular evoked the critical queasiness stirred up by Littell's novel, with its widely quoted remark that "This is one of the most repugnant books I have ever read." She further contends that "there is something awry in this book's unremitting immersion in Aue's worldview, without any effort--direct or indirect, latent or manifest, philosophical or artistic--to balance or counteract it in any way." Melvin Jules Bukiet claims similarly that it is "not that a reader necessarily seeks a lesson, but fiction and nonfiction ought to approach the subject as more than an opportunity to wallow in the worst humankind has to offer," and these two comments most explicity reveal the incomprehension with which so many American reviewers of The Kindly Ones reacted to the narrative constructed by its protagonist.

Both Franklin and Bukiet implicitly testify here to the success with which Littell has given over the novel to his protagonist's Weltenschauung, a word Aue himself uses frequently, even if they also find that aesthetic act objectionable. In my opinion, a novel could do worse than engage in an "unremitting immersion" in its character's worldview, or, for that matter, "wallow in the worst humankind has to offer." That the critic found himself wallowing seems an indication that Littell has indeed created a compelling "narrative consciousness" that brings us uncomfortably close to an unsavory character with a repulsive worldview, not to mention overwhelming psychological problems.

Does an author have a responsibility to "balance" a character's unpleasant views or behavior with normative gestures, either "latent or manifest," indicating the author disapproves of the character's opinions and actions? Surely no reader believes that Littell does approve of his character's actions, so the perceived problem here must be that exposure to a character like Maximilien Aue will unduly soil the sensibilities of the reader. But surely no one expects readers to be converted to Nazism or sadomasochism through Aue's account of himself, either, so one must conclude that Franklin's and Bukiet's dislike of an "unremitting immersion in Aue's worldview" has been converted into a general critical requirement that bad people as depicted in fiction must be "counteracted" by a "philosophical or artistic " effort to meliorate their evil. One suspects that, despite his protestation that we don't necessarily need a "lesson" from such a novel as The Kindly Ones, Bukiet would prefer that its unmediated access to the point of view of a morally compromised protagonist be placed in a more didactically clear context as a corrective to "wallowing."

What is going to focus our attention on "the worst humankind has to offer" if not, at least occasionally, fiction? Is this a subject that ought to be ignored or forbidden? Why not write (or read) a novel that allows a Nazi SS man to speak of his experiences as witness to and participant in the attempted extermination of Jews and any other undesirable people? For such a novel to be successful it will almost necessarily offend and disturb some readers, but that is the consequence of attempting the work in the first place. Taking offense--or finding the novel "repugnant"--is not a credible aesthetic judgment, and in my opinion most of the negative reviews of The Kindly Ones lack credibility because they were either explicit expressions of distaste of this kind or thinly disguised versions of such distaste masquerading as critique of character and plot logic.

The major accomplishment of The Kindly Ones is the author's thoroughly successful ventriloquism of Dr. Aue, a performance that requires we abide this character in all of his true-believing, sadomasochistic, murderous horror or else the effort is subsumed into the usual safe moralizing provided by "balance." Balance would only produce a cop show-like view of evil, which is comfortably softened by the presence of reassuring outrage at human perfidy. It could be argued that this sort of easy portrayal of the conflict between decency and depravity is false to the actual content of evil, a sentimentalized response. It seems to me that, precisely to the extent Littell has avoided "balance," he has given us a more persuasive representation of evil, something that we must experience for ourselves in its half banality, half degeneracy through Aue's recitation. Only this "unremitting immersion" gets us anywhere near the reality of evil.

Some reviewers focused their criticism of The Kindly Ones more on its deficiencies of plot than on a moral repugnance toward its narrator. Lalami observes that "like Forrest Gump, [Aue] conveniently manages to be wherever the most significant events of the war take place, at the time in which they take place, and to interact with all the relevant figures of Nazism," a plot progression which Zak M. Salih describes as "a collection of the Nazi regime's greatest hits." Peter Kemp further complains of the "pitiless prolixity" with which Aue tells his story and doubts "Aue's prodigious capacity to recall in profuse, minute detail all that was done and said. . . ." That a fussy bureaucrat like Maximilien Aue would remember his actions in great detail--that he might even have records of them--doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, but the question of whether Aue knows too much brings us back to Aue's status as narrator. Perhaps he does too conveniently recall the details of his wartime experiences. As far as I know, no one has questioned the accuracy of the historical details in which Aue's fictionalized story is embedded, but of course there is no way to "verify" the details of the fictional story. Ultimately, it really makes no difference: these are the things that were "done and said" that Aue wants us to know, and the impression they leave about him is presumably the impression he wants to leave.

The same is true of the plot developments that place Aue at so many of the crucial events of the war's waning years. Perhaps Aue is manipulating the historical record in order to give himself a role in all of these events, but again it doesn't really matter. The self-portrayal that emerges is the one Aue must intend. That this portrayal is a damning one suggests either that Aue is (consciously or subconsciously) submitting himself for judgment or that his particular involvement in the Final Solution is to be taken at face value. The former is not impossible, especially given his willingness to reveal all of his psychosexual problems as well. However, accepting that Aue happened to be in a position to witness so much of Nazi Germany's dissolution, at least for the purposes of the novel his fictional existence makes possible, doesn't seem to me such a difficult concession. His presence at the decisive stages of this process could just be, in fact, the reason he decided to write his memoir, following up on the less comprehensive accounts of other ex-Nazi colleagues.

Whatever degree of artifice Littell has brought to the plot of The Kindly Ones--at least that part of the plot devoted to chronicling the extermination program as it leads Aue from the Ukraine to Hitler's bunker--I found it riveting. Unlike some commentators who concluded that through the recounting of these events with their frequent expressions of dismay with the program and its methods, Littell was attempting to "humanize" Dr. Aue, I found the portrait of SS officers manifesting a degree of struggle with the task they'd been assigned a compelling alternative to the usual image of Nazis as unambiguously malevolent. To this extent, a character like Aue is humanized, but this only makes his and his fellow officer's actions more appalling, since they arise from recognizable human beings rather than caricatures. Some of these actions, such as the Babi Yar massacre, are hard to take, but their depiction commands attention.

One element of the novel's narrative structure does threaten to become overly artificial. Overlain on the story of Aue's war journey is a parallel association with Aeschylus's Oresteia, featuring Aue as Orestes (a device similar to the "mythic method" of Joyce's Ulysses). Ultimately these parallels might be a little too neat. Daniel Mendelsohn does a good job of teasing out the implications of this strategy in his review of The Kindly Ones (the title being a direct reference to the "furies" of Aeschylus's play, who are transformed at the end of the play into "kindly ones"), and while I agree with Mendelsohn that Littell employs the strategy skillfully, I can't agree that the problem it causes is that, in portraying Aue as "a sex-crazed, incestuous, homosexual, matricidal coprophage," it works against the historical portrayal of Aue as a "human brother." I just don't perceive any effort on Littell's effort to affirm Aue as a "human brother," as opposed to simply a "human being," and it does not make him into something other than a human being to imply, metaphorically, that Aue is a man pursued by his own sort of "furies."

What makes me less enamored of the mythic method as employed in The Kindly Ones is precisely that it threatens to disrupt our "immersion" in Aue's fictional memoir, that it intrudes on the performance of Aue's narration a different kind of performance, one that makes us too conscious of the author--Jonathan Littell--as the puppeteer pulling Aue's strings. For an exercise in point of view like The Kindly Ones to work most efficaciously, it ought to commit itself fully to the discourse of the narrator, and in my opinion the narrative doubling introduced by the Orestes story detracts from that commitment.

Unless. In his review of the novel, Paul La Farge comments that "If it were only Aue making himself out to be Orestes, you’d dismiss the gesture as an unjustified but understandable bid for sympathy, but it’s Littell who puts Aue through Orestes’s paces, as if to give credence to Aue’s assertion that 'in this [life] I never had a choice,' that his free will was curtailed by 'the weight of fate.''' Of course it is finally Littell "who puts Aue through Orestes's paces" in that Aue is the narrator of the novel Littell has written. In this sense, Littell puts Aue through all of his "paces." But there's nothing really to prevent us from attributing most, if not all, of the allusions to the Oresteia to Aue himself, either through the many direct references he makes or through both the additions and omissions (such as the episode in which he kills his mother and her husband, which he subsequently can't remember) he brings to bear on the story he wants to tell. If Aue attempts a play on our sympathy through these allusions--"I never had a choice"--we can accept it as such without believing his resort to this grandiosity actually absolves him of blame.

I'm not really sure I fully embrace this interpretation. The heavy-handed allusiveness may just be an aesthetic mistake, a secondary flaw we have to countenance while otherwise acknowledging the narrative power of the novel as a whole. The Kindly Ones rather early on overwhelmed my own general disdain for history-based fiction not by "bringing history to life" but by bringing life to history.

06/10/2009

I was persuaded to read Thomas Glavinic's Night Work by Steve Mitchelmore's thoughtful review of the novel. I do believe that Steve's defense of its strategy of non-revelation is more convincing than the complaints made by some reviewers that the novel fails because it does not adequately account for the circumstances motivating the story, but ultimately I wasn't quite as taken with Night Work as was Steve or some other of its reviewers. I'm not sorry I expended the time to read the book, although it has turned out to be one of those books that, for me at least, has been more stimulating to think about in retrospect than it was while reading it.

To some degree I expected to not like the book much at all, however much I generally trust Steve Mitchelmore's judgment. If it's not exactly a "post-apocalytic" novel, it sounds when first described to be close enough to that sub-genre, and I can't say I've ever been one of its fans. (And I don't mean just its SF version in particular; the post-apocalyptic novels written by Denis Johnson and Paul Auster and Cormac McCarty haven't done much for me, either.) These novels always seem to be striving so hard to "say something"--about technological development, about human nature, about what the future might bring if we don't watch out!--that I am unable to take much pleasure in them as works of fiction on a purely aesthetic level. It's not that the "vision" of human life after the ultimate catastrophe is itself unpleasantly dark; it's that the formal resources of fiction have been so thoroughly subsumed to rhetorical ends that I feel I'm being lectured.

Night Work mostly avoids this problem, although questions about what has happened and why must inevitably persist about a narrative that posits a world emptied of all human and animal life save for the story's protagonist, Jonas. But not only does the novel resolutely refuse to disclose the source of the protagonist's dilemma, it becomes clear rather early on that the source of this dilemma is really beside the point. This is a novel set in an apparently calamitous future that is not going to resolve itself into a meditation on that calamity or a satire of human folly but is instead going to explore through the actions and state of mind of its solitary main character what it would be like to be the last vestige of conscious life in existence.

The narrative does playfully leave the suggestion that the "night work" performed by Jonas's sleeping self might be the cause of his predicament, perhaps a kind of half-awake dissociative state. Jonas begins videotaping himself asleep, and he does witness what must be episodes of sleepwalking (which also start to become evident in other ways as well, as when Jonas apparently locks himself into the trunk of his car while asleep). The moment when Jonas watches his sleepwalking self peer into the camera at his awakened self (or vice versa?) is almost vertiginous in its self-referentiality. But even if sleepwalking provides some sort of "explanation" of Jonas's experiences--and it would be a pretty lame one, if we were to take it literally--it doesn't finally matter to our own experience of Jonas's story. Whether it is "really" happening or not fades in importance, as does whether it occurs in the aftermath of a plague, or an alien invasion, or through any other "logical" explanation, to the comprehensive accounting of Jonas's response to the new realities of his situation, literally dreamed up or not.

One inevitably thinks of the night work named in the title as being the work of fiction as well. What Jonas confronts is something he desperately hopes is fiction--a forced encounter with "reality" on a transformed, elemental level--but that increasingly forces itself on him as reality, however uncanny it has become. If it is possible to emerge from the structured dream of fiction with an expanded sense of reality, Jonas is unable to emerge from his dream at all, and he learns that the reality it has become is ultimately unbearable. But this is where my appreciation of Night Work begins to break down. I'm not really sure how much Glavinic himself appreciates the literary/aesthetic implications of his novel, and this reservation is reinforced by both the novel's narrative method and its prose style.

Night Work is presented to us through a more or less conventional third-person narration. It begins on the morning Jonas enters into his anomalous state and ends with his apparent death. Although we are restricted to Jonas's own actions and perceptions, we are not immersed fully into his "deep" consciousness as in much "psychological realism," and while this is to some degree a deliverance from this now stale approach, it creates another problem in a narrative so reduced to activity and event. The narration is mostly concerned to relate what Jonas does:

In the station concourse he trotted from ticket office to ticket office, shop to shop, smashing the windows with his wrench. He didn't disconnect the security alarms this time. Having broken the window of the bureau de change, he waited to see if its alarm would go off, or if he would have to continue his orgy of destruction. Perhaps some-still surviving guardian of the law would think a heist was in progress and intervene.

To the ear-splitting accompaniment of the security alarms he rode the escalator up to the platforms. Taking his time, he began by exploring platforms 1 to 11 in the east section, where he'd seldom been before. Then he boarded the second escalator.

He also smashed the windows of the shops in the south section. They weren't equipped with burglar alarms, which surprised him. He raided one for a bag of crisps and a can of lemonade, plus a packet of paper handkerchiefs for his runny nose. From the newsagent's he grabbed a stack of newspapers two days old.

The level of detail provided here (and throughout the novel) is so generic I almost feel I am reading a screenplay, or at least a novel heavily influenced by cinema. This wouldn't necessarily be an inherent flaw--Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre are both ingenious appropriations of film for literary effect--but the straighforwardly episodic structure of Night Work is not particularly enlivened by its prose, which, as in the passage quoted, remains rather pedestrian. If Night Work becomes particularly laborious in its middle sections, its uninspired language seems to me the immediate cause.

Or at least so it seems, as I am judging Glavinic's style as rendered in its English translation. Perhaps the banality of "trotted from office to office" and the cliches of "orgy of destruction" and "guardian of the law" are fair equivalents of Glavinic's German phrases, or perhaps they are as close as the translator could get to Glavinic's more felicitous words. Since my German is near non-existent, I really have no way of telling, so while I am inclined to think that the bland prose style is authentic enough Glavinic, I was sufficiently engaged with his story and his intrepid commitment to its ultimate indeterminacy that I'd like to think this translation is not appropriately faithful to the German text.

06/03/2009

Most discussion of the work of Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld eventually focuses on Appelfeld's status as a "Holocaust writer," even if it is acknowledged that in his novels the deportation of European Jews to the death camps and to their murder there is not directly depicted, nor are the horrors experienced there by those who managed to escape or survive their attempted murder explicitly recalled, rarely even mentioned. The silence about the massacre itself is taken to be a strategic silence, whereby the Holocaust looms even larger for its absence in Appelfeld's narratives.

I don't necessarily disagree that Appelfeld's consistent elision of the Holocaust has the effect of drawing the reader's attention to that elision, but perhaps it would be just as true to Appelfeld's intentions and achievement to regard his subject not as the Holocaust, nor even as the conditions, attitudes, or assumptions that preceded and, to a lesser extent, succeeded the event itself, but more plainly as the lives lived by diasporan European Jews prior to the cultural cataclysm represented by the Holocaust, as well as the subsequent response to the extinction of that way of life by those who remained. Applefeld's fiction seems to me much more concerned with the specific experiences of specific characters in a specific time and place than in subsuming those experiences into some overarching abstraction, even one as potent as the Holocaust has become.

For this reason, I also have trouble reading Appelfeld's novels as allegories, as many other reviewers and critics seem to do, although in their relative brevity and episodic structure they undeniably do seem closer to fabulation than to slice-of-life realism. The two most recent of his novels to be translated into English, All Whom I Have Loved and Laish, might especially seem to invite allegorical interprepation, but while I would not begrudge readers their attempt to find in these novels the kind of accessible "meaning" usually associated with allegory, assuming that the allegorical content is an adequate measure of what Appelfeld's fiction has to offer seems to me at best mistaken and at worst just a way of assigning it to some manageable category that excuses inattentive reading.

Appelfeld is often enough compared to Kafka, but this comparison in turn generally assumes that Kafka's fiction is allegorical in a more or less overt way. But of course Kafka created narratives that appear to incorporate an allegorical level of meaning only to complicate and ultimately to deny that meaning. Kafka's world purports to be comprehensible, its ultimate sense to be discovered just around the next narrative turn, but it is finally a world of no-sense, or, more accurately, only of the aesthetic sense made through its own impeccable construction. Kafka is at pains to give his inscrutable world as much substance and texture as is necessary to make it. . .real. The point of reading Kafka's fiction is not, it seems to me, to arrive at a conclusion that the world we live in is absurd, or frightening, or grotesque, but that the world Kafka has created is self-sustaining and entirely logical.

If Kafka is a touchstone in understanding the work of Aharon Applefeld, then something like this focus on texture, on the imaginatively concrete, must be true of Appelfeld's fiction as well. Like Kafka, Appelfeld in all of his novels is concerned above all to sustain the integrity of his invoked world, to make the reader's experience of that world as palpable as the more customary world assumed in most novels. Indeed, if part of Appelfeld's ambition as a fiction writer is to recapture the lost world of prewar European Jewry, then insuring that the particulars remain in the foreground of the reader's attention seems all the more necessary, even if those particulars must unavoidably be filtered through fallible and subjective retrospection.

All Whom I Have Loved is a characteristic foray into recollected experience, transformed into a narrative of confusion, loss, and the imminent dissolution of all ties to life as it had been known. The story is narrated by Paul Rosenfeld, another of the fictional stand-ins for the young Aharon Appelfeld that we find in numerous Appelfeld novels, and the experiences he relates again seem variations on the essential core of experience Appelfeld brought with him when he managed to emigrate to Israel a year after the war ended. Paul is separated first from his father, a struggling artist, in an acrimonious divorce from Paul's mother, with whom Paul lives afterwards until he comes to feel neglected by her in her efforts to assimilate into the local community--she ultimately marries a schoolteacher colleague, a gentile--and then goes to live with the penurious father. While still living with his mother, Paul is cared for by Halina, a local peasant girl whom Paul eventually witnesses being murdered by her abusive boyfriend. After going with his father (including on a trip to Bucharest, where the father briefly experiences renewed hope in his artistic career, only to have it come to nothing), Paul learns his mother has become sick with typhus, from which she shortly dies. The narrative concludes with the shooting of Paul's father during an attempted robbery of a Jewish store and with Paul facing an anarchic future.

The bare bones of this story--a young Jewish boy growing up in Eastern Europe with some degree of turmoil and/or premature tragedy afflicting his family while the even greater trauma of persecution is beginning to build--recurs in several of Appelfeld's novels. This makes his body of work as a whole more broadly representative, as a new reader can start with any one of the novels and immediately become acquainted with Appelfeld's peristent themes and methods. Since the quality of the novels is remarkably consistent as well--at least in those that have gotten to us English speakers in translation--such a reader can be fairly well assured he/she is getting an illustrative sample of Applefeld's accomplishments as a writer of fiction. It also makes the "allegorical" element of Appelfeld's fiction a less relevant and less helpful orientation to his work for the already committed reader. The symbolic implications of the setting and events related are already apparent enough, and what keeps one reading Appelfeld is less the payoff in "meaning" than an interest in how he will again reshape a particular set of experiences into an engrossing fiction that draws us deeper into the specificity of its recreated world.

A careful reading of All Whom I Have Loved would dwell on a moment such as this:

The next day I stood by the door and said good-bye to Mother. I did not cry. I felt the anguish of parting later, in the bedroom amidst the rumpled bed and scattered clothes. It was a sunny day, and the yard behind the house was filled with light. We went out, and Halina immediately began to show me her wonders: she walked on her hands and then made noises like the cawing of crows; she imitated sheep and cows, frogs, and cuckoos. And for a moment she seemed to be not a person but an amazing animal that knew how to do everything that animals can do: to climb trees nimbly, to crawl, to leap over fences, and to fly. Halina lost no time in trying to teach me her skills, but I was far from agile and scarcely capable of producing a single whistle.

Then we rolled in the grass. Halina was slender and very nimble. I tried hard to catch her, but she ran fast and could hop like a rabbit. I stared at her and knew: I would never be able to do the same.

Not only is this passage notable for its aptly chosen detail--"in the bedroom amidst the rumpled bed and scattered clothes"--and not only does it provide us with an episode of brightness and joy as a balance to the descending gloom that we readers of Paul's narrative can always sense (and the joy is in this case itself leavened by Paul's underlying sadness at the separation from his mother), but to the extent it invites us to incorporate the scene into the abstract allegorical narrative paralleling the actual narrative of his experiences that Paul relates we should be wary of effacing the latter while agreeing to the former. Paul's "I would never be able to do the same" might point us to the incipient terror of the Holocaust, or more generally Paul's long-term inability to indulge in simple pleasures, but it might also, almost certainly does, refer to his literal inability to "run fast" and "hop like a rabbit," at this specific time and place as well as in the projected future. That Paul is "far from agile" is a simple matter of fact, however much we might want to see it as a symptom of some larger metaphysical condition.

If anything, Laish even more obviously seems to court an allegorical interpretation, as it is structured explicitly as a journey, the figurative status of which is further reinforced by the cast of characters and the purpose of their journey: At some unspecified point late in the nineteenth century, an untidy group of Jews is making its way in a caravan across Eastern Europe, its stated mission to reach a point of embarkation to Jerusalem. The group consists of traders, ex-convicts, religious seekers, and various other vulnerable people who have joined up with the caravan over the years. The story of their journey is related by a teenage boy, for whom of course the journey acts as an initiation into the ways of the world but who really acts more as a dispassionate observer of the motley assortment of pilgrims and their interactions with the gentiles they encounter. The caravan more or less falls apart by the time it reaches the port of Galacz, but a few of them do remain, their ultimate fate uncertain as they prepare to board ship and the narrator notes that "It appeared to me that all those who had fled were standing at some distance and staring at us."

It would be easy enough to take this story as "the story" of Modern Jewry prior to the founding of Israel, upon the precipice of which the survivors of the caravan symbolically stand. And to some degree it is that story. But it is hard to believe that Appelfeld wrote the novel merely, or even primarily, to advance such a story through what is finally one of the hoariest of devices, the journey narrative. The variety of characters presented and experiences related presses upon the reader's attention more than the goal of the journey itself, and the effect seems more picaresque than emblematic. If Laish does recall Kafka in leaving the caravan and its origins somewhat enigmatic, it also never resolves the enigma into something more readily accessbile to interpretation.

Like All Whom I Have Loved, Laish is composed in short, compact chapters, each relating a brief episode or mini-narrative in Appelfeld's characteristically reticent prose. (At least this is the persistent impression I get from the translations I have read; to examine Appelfeld's prose style more thoroughly would require a facility with Hebrew I don't myself possess.) Even more than in All Whom I Have Loved, in Laish this manner of writing calls attention less to the narrative as a whole, its forward momentum, and more to the self-sufficiency, both in language and in structure, of these discreet parts. Appelfeld is another of those writers who, for me at least, blurs the line between poetry and fiction, in this case by working against the pull of allegory and preserving space for a quiet autonomy of language. To read Laish simply for the meaning conveyed by its plot is to willfully overlook its more impressive effort to find the words that might begin to render experiences that at some point become essentially inexpressible. This is the greater triumph of all of Appelfeld's work.

03/26/2009

Alain Robbe-Grillet begins his essay "From Realism to Reality" (in For a New Novel) with what must be a truism:

All writers believe they are realists. None ever calls himself abstract, illusionistic, chimerical, fantastic, falsitical. . .Realism is not a theory, defined without ambiguity, which would permit us to counter certain writers with certain others; it is, on the contrary, a flag under which the enormous majority--if not all--of today's novelists enlist. And no doubt we must believe them all, on this point. It is the real world which interests them; each one attempts as best as can to create "the real." (Translation by Richard Howard)

Robbe-Grillet believed himself to be a realist and his attempts at advancing a "new novel" an effort to preserve the possibility of realism in fiction against the insistence of some critics that the novel remain encased in its pre-modern form. "The discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outworn forms," Robbe Grillet writes. "Unless we suppose that the world is henceforth entirely discovered (and, in that case, the wisest thing would be to stop writing altogether), we can only attempt to go farther. It is not a question of 'doing better,' but of advancing in ways as yet unknown, in which a new kind of writing becomes necessary."

This "new kind of writing" is necessary for realism's sake. Even if it is true that each succeeding generation of writers "has different ideas of reality," that "the classicists believed that it is classical, the romantics that it is romantic, the surrealists that it is surreal," the task of coping with "the objective modifications of reality" that have continued to develop at an ever increasing pace since the 19th century requires that the novel remain open to the kind of formal innovation that might--for the moment, at least--begin to "account for what is real today."

But Robbe-Grillet didn't think that the "realism" of novels consisted of merely reflecting the "real world" it encountered but that it actually worked to create reality:

The style of the novel does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation. All those--politicians and others--who ask of a book only stereotypes, and who fear above all the spirit of contestation, can only mistrust literature.

Robbe-Grillet comes a little closer to commenting on the kind of realism one finds in his own books when he reflects on a trip he once took to the Brittany coast:

On the way I told myself: here is a good opportunity to observe things 'from life' and to 'refresh my memory.' But from the first gull I saw, I understood my error: on the one hand, the gulls I now saw had only very confused relations with those I was describing in my book, and on the other hand it couldn't have mattered less to me whether they did or not. The only gulls that mattered to me at that moment were those which were inside my head. Probably they came there, one way or another, from the external world, and perhaps from Brittany; but they had been transformed, becoming at the same time somehow more real because they were now imaginary.

Those gulls inside the head are the gulls that make it into Robbe-Grillet's novels, even if they are described with a kind of obsessive exactitude that makes us believe they're a copy from "real life." Or, for example, we get this, the opening paragraph of Jealousy, which describes the south side of the house that will be the immediate setting for all of the novel:

Now the shadow of the column--the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof--divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts. This verana is a wide, covered gallery surrounding the house on three sides. Since its width is the same for the central portion as for the sides, the line of shadow cast by the column extends precisely to the corner of the house; but it stops there, for only the veranda flagstones are reached by the sun, which is still too high in the sky. The wooden walls of the house--that is, its front and west gable-end--are still protected from the sun by the roof (common to the house proper and the terrace). So at this moment the shadow of the outer edge of the roof coincides exactly with the right angle formed by the terrace and the two vertical surfaces of the corner of the house.

Already we can see Robbe-Grillet beginning to "constitute" the reality of the novel's setting, which will extend to the banana plantation of which this house is the center, all described in the same painstaking, concentrated manner. And it is a particularly literal-minded kind of description: no fussy, unnecessary adjectives, no figurative flourishes to get in the way of a full-on apprehension of the house and its wooden walls, its veranda flagstones and "vertical surfaces." Robbe-Grillet's approach has at times been called "cinematic," but what could be less cinematic than this description of the banana trees:

In the second row, starting from the far left, there would be twenty-two trees (because of the alternate arrangement) in the case of a rectangular patch. There would also be twenty-two for a patch that was precisely trapezoidal, the reduction being scarely noticeable at such a short distance from its base. And, in fact, there are twenty-two trees there.

But the third row too has only twenty-two trees, instead of twenty three which the alternately-arranged rectangle would have. No additional difference is introduced, at this level, by the bulge in the lower edge. The same is true for the fourth row, which includes twenty-one boles, that is, one less than an even row of the imaginary rectangle.

It is generally assumed that film provides a more immediate and more distinct rendering of perceptible objects (at least visually), but passages like this demonstate that verbal depictions of such objects are, potentially at least, capable of a far greater range of effects, of bringing us much closer to the palpable qualities of things. In his essay, Robbe-Grillet writes of Kafka that "if there is one thing of which an unprejudiced realing convinces us it is the absolute reality of the things Kafka describes. . .Perhaps Kafka's staircases lead elsewhere, but they are there, and we look at them, step by step, following the detail of the banisters and the risers. Perhaps his gray walls hide something, but it is on them that the memory lingers, on their cracked whitewash, their crevices." The same is true of Robbe-Grillets descriptions; they force our attention on what is there. We remember (or should) the arrangements and textures of the plantation house, the symmetries of the banana rows.

Some might say that Robbe-Grillet's descriptions don't qualify as "realism" at all, since they appear to reject the principle of selectivity of detail and renounce the effort to enhance the real through figurative language, both of which are believed by such guardians of literary realism to be among its most crucial enabling conventions. But this is to confuse the practice of a certain kind of commercialized storytelling with realism, the latter of which probably becomes more genuine the farther away it gets from storytelling. It is to pin the concept of realism down to a few customary gestures that assume a stability of reference to "the real" and denies that this is a state of affairs to be discovered rather than presupposed. In abandoning these gestures, Robbe-Grillet's "experimental" fiction is actually an experiment in the further possibilities of realism, a realism that accepts, as Robbe-Grillet puts it in his essay's conclusion, that "everything is constantly changing" and that "there is always something new."

The realism of Jealousy is about as far away from modern "psychological realism," and especially the mode of narration James Wood defends as the "free indirect" method, as it could be. Our access to the characters and their environment remains entirely on the surface, our knowledge of what they are "thinking" confined entirely to what we can infer through their actions. This, is, of course, faithful to the way we do in fact experience reality, and the spurious notion that fiction is some magical way for writers to open up consciousness to our direct examination beyond what people say and do is duly dispensed with in Robbe-Grillet's novel. This is not to say that we don't ultimately gain access to a character's mental state, but this character is neither A. . . (not further named), the plantation wife, nor her possible lover, Franck (we're never entirely sure they are lovers), the ostensible protagonists of Jealousy. One could say that the true protagonist of the novel is the emotion named in the title, which we finally come to understand is expressed by the narrator, who is not the detached omniscient narrator we first assume him to be (or at least is also more than that) but the husband of A. . . and an observer of her suspicious behavior.

Thus we do almost literally inhabit the consciousness of this character, and we are determined in our experience of Jealousy's fictional world by the skillful manipulation of point of view--in this case a third-person/first-person hybrid. But, since we can't rest comfortably in the author's probing of the character's mind in a "free indirect" way, the effect is if anything to provoke us into re-reading the novel in order to direct our attention more carefully on the details and the actions through which, and only through which, can our awareness of the narrator's jealousy be raised. Jealousy encourages the reader to be an active participant in assembling whatever "meaning" we're to get from it; it doesn't allow us to settle passively for the "insight" afforded us by Wood's preferred strategy of "inflected" narration.

What this hybrid point of view allows Robbe-Grillet to do most thoroughly, however, is to create an intimately "realistic" world that both mirrors the narrator's own fixated absorption in detail--his "perpetual interrogation"-- and uses that absorption to "invent" scenes and circumstances of dense realistic detail. So dedicated is Robbe-Grillet to the invention of these scenes that he repeats many of them, enlisting his narrator in a repetition and return to specific details and events--the remains of a centipede killed while walking across a wall, workers fixing a bridge, etc.--as if making sure they have been surveyed for all of the attributes they can be made to reveal. The ultimate effect is of a scrupulously observed, enclosed world that is wholly imaginary, constituted through the writer's determination to invoke it in his words, and thus also wholly real.

12/15/2008

To understand Creeley, say, you would have to know about Williams, Pound, Duncan, Olson, Levertov. Also Ginsberg and O'Hara and Lowell--representing directions he didn't take. Maybe also Thomas Hardy and some of Creeley's other favorite British poets. Some medieval lyrics. The understanding of Creeley within his context and tradition entails a very dense and nuanced positioning.

It strikes me (and this is not a new observation with me) that we tend to read "foreign" poets in a quite different way. We never see them against the backdrop of their mediocre contemporaries who never get translated. Usually it is only one or two poets from any given country who are at all known at any given time, so there is rarely a sense of Creeley's "company," the social network of poets. The poet translated stands pretty much alone.

While I ultimately believe that a work of literature can and should stand "pretty much alone" in the reader's immediate aesthetic response to the work, the provocation to which remains, in my opinion, the primary ambition of poetry and fiction under any plausible conception of their "literary" status, to "understand" a poet's, or a fiction writer's, body of work more broadly surely does require--or at least certainly is enhanced by--locating it within the writer's "context and tradition." Although this context includes both historical context and the web of direct and indirect influences, ultimately it encompasses the writer's particular relationship to his/her native language and the set of practices with which he/she most closely identifies. Such context can be "dense" indeed, tracing out its dominion not just "nuanced" but a potentially never-ending task.

For those of us who must read "international" writers in translation, we unfortunately must for the most part make do without this context. The text "stands alone" in a way that deprives us of a linguistic foundation that would give our reading experience solidity. Combining this with the vagaries of translation as part of the "book business," which leave us without knowledge of the "social network" to which Jonathan alludes, in effect puts most American readers, at least, in a position of ignorance when assessing poems and novels outside the "English" context. This problem is arguably more acute with poetry, which embodies an especially intimate connection to "context and tradition" and which is translated even less frequently than fiction, but I think the problem exists with fiction as well. Perhaps I could simply pick up one of the Roberto Bolano novels that now seems to be on everybody's reading list and read it with adequate appreciation, but I really doubt it. While the "context" provided by the "tradition" of Latin American fiction is probably more accessible to American readers than many other international literatures, somehow it doesn't seem likely that the context in which the Chilean Bolano was nourished is interchangeable with that in which the Colombian Marquez came to literary maturity. That doesn't mean I won't read Bolano, but before I do so I am trying to understand as much of his "context" as I can from the accumulating number of reviews and critical essays about his work now becoming available.

Of course, I'll never be able to acquire all the context I need simply from reading reviews and gleaning what I can from them. This is where someone like Jonathan Mayhew, who is himself a scholar of Spanish literature (specifically modern Spanish poetry), could play a valuable role in making translated work meaningful to nonspecialist readers, if publishers would allow him to do it. In my experience, most translations come without any context at all, except occasionally through a translator's introduction that usually doesn't go very far (through no fault of the translator, I'm sure, who has to fight the effort among American publishers to hide the fact of translation in the first place). Scholars and critics fluent in the "context and traditon" of the national literature at hand, ideally of the specific writer in question, could provide, through preface and appendices, relevant commentary that would surely illuminate some of the darkness in which we are now asked to approach translated work. Ideally, some sort of textual commentary (made as nondisruptive as possible) could also be included. I realize that this kind of apparatus is usually reserved for "classic" works intended for classroom use, but I don't think we can pretend that translations shorn of such support are sufficient for presenting the work, poetry or fiction, of translated authors, especially authors to whom we come completely unfamiliar.

Even if such aids to reading were routinely offered, however, we would still fall woefully short of understanding the "company" every writer keeps. Only the kind of immersion in a national language that fluency in that language makes possible would allow us to approach such understanding. And as long as only "one or two poets from any given country" (perhaps a few more fiction writers) are available even in translation, we'll get no more than a similacrum of familiarity with either individual writers or the "social network" to which they are connected. On the other hand, few of us put forth the effort to comprehend the literary context from which writers in our own language emerge, which, as Jonathan's brief survey of Robert Creeley's influences attests, can be a daunting task in itself. Whether this makes one's dependence on translation for access to so many important writers seem less, or more, futile is a hard question to answer.

ADDENDUM Miriam Burstein makes some useful remarks about this subject.

09/23/2008

Most of the reviews of Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States (including the British reviews of the book under its original title of Miss Herbert) concentrated on its idiosyncratic structure and unceremonious tone (idiosyncratic and unceremonious for a work of literary criticism, at any rate). Reviewers seemed to find both annoying distractions from the occasional critical insight Thirlwell offers, and their reservations about Thirlwell as a critic were generally confined to these admittedly unorthodox features of his book.

While it is true that the central argument Thirlwell wants to make in The Delighted States could probably have been made in a much shorter book, perhaps even in a critical essay, I can't say I found either Thirlwell's circuitous method of analysis, which proceeds both back and forth across time and national literatures and sideways from author to author (at times providing unusual and surprising juxtapositions), or his conversational style particularly bothersome. I take the travelogue approach to be Thirlwell's attempt to reinforce the book's overriding point--that fiction in effect speaks an international language that manages to survive its migration through translation from one literary tradition to another--in the form his book assumes, and it is an effective enough device. It might not be the sort of method one expects from a work of serious literary criticism, but there is no inherent reason criticism can't accomodate such an alternative strategy.

Further, both the looser, more informal structure and the reader-friendly critical language Thirlwell employs seem to me to work to accomplish one of criticism's legitimate tasks, which is to explicate features of literary works that are not necessarily obvious to all readers, that require the critic to call attention to them as evocatively as possible. In The Delighted States, Thirlwell is making a case for the efficacy of translation that calls for numerous and at times subtle comparisons and analogies, and his manner of leading the reader along his route of unexpected congruences, pointing out the connections more as an enthusiastic guide than as a source of critical pronouncements, is a perfectly sound way to proceed. If the test of a worthwhile critic is whether his reader is able to regard an author. a text, or literary history with enhanced understanding, then Thirlwell passes this test readily enough.

Something that may have contributed to reviewers' lack of enthusiasm for The Delighted States is Thirlwell's emphasis on innovation in fiction, a preference that consistently informs his survey of literary influence and the role of translation in the evolution of fiction as a form. Along with his related emphasis on form (which he often conflates with "style"), Thirwell's focus on aesthetic innovation must have grated on the sensibilities of mainstream reviewers, who generally look askance at innovation as manifested in contemporary fiction and mostly ignore form in favor of what a work of fiction has "to say" (when they're not simply judging it for its superficial entertainment value, its success or failure at being a "good read"). For me, that Thirlwell's book illustrates the extent to which the history of fiction is the history of inspired change is its greatest virtue, but for some of its reviewers its own unconventional form as literary criticism may have only reminded them of Thirwell's implicit defense of the role of the unconventional in literary history.

None of the book's reviewers, however, chose to examine what to me is its most problematic claim--or, as it turns out, series of claims. In his commitment to the idea that all works of fiction are translatable, even down to a particular writer's distinctive "style," Thirlwell makes the following observations:

. . .A style may be as large as the length of a book. Its units may well be moe massive, and more vague, than I would often like.

A style, in the end, is a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless.

In fact, it can become something which is finally not linguistic at all. For the way in which a novelist represents life depends on what a novelist thinks is there in a life to be represented. A style is therefore as much a quirk of emotion, or of theological belief, as it is a quirk of language.

A style does not entirely coincide with prose style, or formal construction, or technique. (20)

In order to maintain his position that fiction can be translated without appreciable dimunition in the integrity of the translated text, Thirlwell needs to minimize the obstacles posed by "style" understood as a writer's characteristic exploration of the resources of his/her native language. One way to do that would be simply to dismiss the importance of style in comparison to all of the other elements of fiction that could well come through in a good translation without loss of effect. To his credit, Thirlwell does not do this; instead, he radically expands the meaning of "style" so that it includes. . .well, just about everything: It is "a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless."

But, of course, if style is everything, so "various" as to be "endless" in its features, it is actually nothing. Thirlwell in fact deprives it of its one materially definable quality when he asserts that it might be "something which is not linguistic at all." This notion, that style is not fundamentally a phenomenon of language, recurs throughout Thirlwell's discussions of his international (although primarily British and European) cast of writers, even of those writers, such as Flaubert or Chekhov, known for their attention to "linguistic" style. He picks up on Marcel Proust's comment about style as "quality of vision" and uses this phrase as a kind of summary concept encapsulating his definition of style in ist most "massive" incarnation. What persists in a translation, then, is this quality of vision, which in its grand scope dwarfs mere facility with language.

I confess I don't finally understand the need for this erasure of style in its tangible, most coherent form. However much it grasps metaphorically at a less tangible if still apprehensible object of our experience of fiction, to speak of "quality of vision" does not adequately account for the concrete achievements of writers as stylists. However much I value Flaubert's "quality of vision" (which is a lot), it just seems to me manifestly obvious that reading Flaubert in English is not the same experience as reading him in French. Reading Virginia Woolf in French cannot be more than a necessary if barely sufficient substitute for those French speakers without English who want to read her work. While I am reasonably sure that the comic vision of Stanley Elkin would still be preserved for those reading his fiction in a translation, how in the world could this writer's style survive the crossing-over?

Near the end of The Delighted States, Thirlwell scales back the grandiosity of his claims about translation:

All through this book, I have been arguing that style is the most important thing, and survives its mutilating translations--that although the history of translation is always a history of disillusion, something survives. . . . (429)

Yes, of course something survives. What serious reader sadly restricted to one language (or even two or three) would claim otherwise? Certainly I wouldn't. But I'm comfortable with accepting that this "something" includes inspired storytelling or formal inventiveness or compelling characters, but not style except in a more or less successful approximation. To stretch "style" into "vision" or "theological belief" is way too misty and metaphysical for me. I'm willing to settle for style as irretrievably "linguistic," a writer's artful way with words.

08/26/2008

In a recent post at his Sentencesblog, Wyatt Mason examines a passage from Robert Chandler's translation of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and enthuses over its wonders. Although Mason acknowledges that it is a translation, and rightly notes that without it we who have no Russian would have no access to Grossman's writing at all, still, I am reluctant to myself conclude definitively that the quoted passage has precisely the qualities that Mason otherwise ably explicates. Indeed it is a translation, and it is possible the translator has actually improved it in its transformation into English, or made it worse, or in some other way failed to adequately render the original in a way that would dupicate the Russian reader's experience of Grossman's text.

This is not to say that the passage does not have the qualities Mason describes, and certainly not that Chandler's translation is ultimately a failure. I have no way of knowing whether it succeeds or not, and while I am usually willing to take the word of a critic proficient in another language that a given translation is acceptable or not, I am not thereby sufficiently emboldened to approach the text as a critic in the same way I am willing to work with a text written in English. Since I am a critic still attached to "close reading," to examining a work for its stylistic felicities and its formal characteristics, the awareness that with a translated text I am at best confronting it in a second-hand version is enough to warn me away from making any confident assertions about it.

Which is why I concentrate, both on this blog and in my other critical writing, mostly on fiction written in English, even more specifically on American fiction since I feel most able to engage with texts composed in American English (and also with the cultural realities often underlying American language conventions). In a sense I feel I am only capable of making specifically literary judgments on works in English, although I'm relatively certain the kinds of judgments I might make vis-a-vis American fiction are also relevant to fiction written in other languages. I just can't get close enough to such texts to be sure. There are times when the formal invention in an other-language work is evident enough that I can point it out with some confidence my critical eye is appropriately focused--most recently this happened with Magdalena Tulli's Flaw--but generally I stay away from making pronouncements on texts that in a sense I have not really been able to read in their native state.

I recognize that there are some critics fluent enough in second or third languages that they are perfectly reliable close readers of both English-language texts and of literary works in other languages. Unfortunately, the Spanish and French I learned well enough to pass a proficiency exam in graduate school are not good enough to allow me to pretend to read works in those languages other than in translation. This is probably a kind of self-imposed limitation on my range as a critic, but on the other hand I do feel that by restricting my critical commentary to (mostly) American fiction, I am able both to anchor my comments more firmly, and more deeply, in a particular literary tradition and its distinctive practices and to provide a context within which new works can be profitably read. It allows me to, perhaps, speak with somewhat more authority about American writers and writing by demonstrating a familiarity with the enabling assumptions, including assumptions about language, that have characterized American fiction over the long run.

I certainly don't want to imply that translations perform no useful service or that we in the United States need fewer, rather than more, of them. It's a scandal that so comparatively few translated works are made available to American readers and that so comparatively few of those readers seem to be demanding them. Translations allow us an important, if ultimately somewhat cloudy, window on the literary practices of the rest of the world, practices from which both readers and writers can and must learn. But given the haphazard way in which translations come to us (without much useful information about why this writer has been translated or why that writer is important), as well as my professed limitations as a reader of translations, I expect to continue emphasizing them on this blog only periodically.

07/10/2008

First will come the costumes. The tailor will supply them all wholesale. He'll select the designs off-handedly and, with a few snips of the shears, will summon to life a predictable repertoire of gestures. See--scraps of fabric and thread in a circle of light, while all around is darkness. Out of the turmoil will emerge a fold of cloth, the germ of a tuck fastened with a pin. The tuck will create everything else. If it's sufficiently deep, it will call into existence a glittering watch chain on a protruding belly, labored breathing, and a bald head bedewed with perspiration. One thing leads to another.

One thing leads to another, not just in the tailor's work but in the work of fiction before us, the creation of which is being laid out much as the tailor lays out the cloth to cut. The narrative begins with the tailor, who is needed for that "predictable repertoire of gestures" his actions call forth, the marks of "character" to be found in the costumes worn. Additional items--a maid's dress, a notary's collar, a student's jacket, a general's uniform--are made, all for the "characters" who will later wear them as they play their roles in the story just beginning.

Soon the setting for this story, a city square, is introduced:

The place may look like some quiet neighborhood of a large city, where squares of this sort are encountered at very step amid the dense network of streets. But the vast whole to which this fragment belongs is not accessible. On each of the several streets connecting to the square, the pavement comes to an end just beyond the corner. Anyone who unduly trusts the solid look of the basalt cobbles and wishes to go elsewhere will immediately be mired in sandy excavations, amid the blank walls of apartment buildings, under windows drawn in chalk directly onto the plaster. Distant steeples and indistinct towers rise over the roofs and suggest the dimensions of the entirety of which this square is supposedly a part. Yet the whole itself must remain conjecture, as imponderable as accomplished facts or as forecasts of the future. Maintaining its substance and its walls and rooftops multiplied in real space would be impossible for me, and also unnecessary. In the meantime, the streetcar is already moving on its track. This will be the zero-line streetcar, the only line there is, and more than sufficient for the needs of a single square. Let the shape of the zero, unhurriedly described, accentuate the extraordinary qualities of the circle, a figure perfectly enclosed, whose whole is encompassed by a continuous line without losing a thing.

On the one hand, it is relatively easy to evoke a sense of "realism." All that is needed is a flower bed fillled with "small yellow blooms," some "ornamental railings on the balconies and lace curtains in the windows," the "basalt cobbles." On the other, to extend this realism to the "vast whole" beyond the square and its provisional, self-enclosed existence is not worth the trouble, is impossible to maintain and of little value if the "world" as represented in a city square is as much world as the novelist needs to portray it in fiction. Like the zero-line streetcar, this aesthetic world can be "perfectly enclosed. . .encompassed by a continuous line without losing a thing."

Soon enough, the characters themselves start making their appearances, characters such as the local policeman:

The policeman moves on as the streetcar continues its route around the square. How would that rather faded uniform sit on me? Maybe it would pinch under the arms? If I am the policeman, there was a time when I risked my neck in the trenches for the emblem that appears on my cap.

"I" is the narrative voice whose invocation of place and character we are witnessing as he/she/it brings the novel we are reading to "life." It should not be associated directly with the author but is instead a kind of character the author has created, a "novelist" whose job it is to bring together all of the elements that are needed to set the narrative into motion and keep it functioning. Sometimes this narrative voice conveys the story--or what is ultimately the story of the story--as a third-person narrator, outside all of the other characters and focusing on them one by one, but at times reconsiders the point of view and offers fragments related in the first person: "If I am the policeman. . ."; "If I am the notary's maid, on the second floor of the apartment building at number seven I take the vegetables out the basket. . ."; "If I am the notary, I shave with caution, and my hand never trembles. Before my eyes I can still see the blood I just wiped off the mirror, a reminder that my body is tired and all set to lower its tone." At times it is as if the narrator is leaving it up to us to decide whether we prefer the "inside" or the "outside" perspective, or, perhaps, whether in the end such a distinction is very meaningful.

Flaw relates what happens on this square over the course of a single day. And it is an eventful day. Most dramatically, a large group of "refugees" emerges from the streetcar and crowds into the square, to the extreme consternation of the local residents. Eventually the refugess are confined en masse in a cellar, but at the end of the day it is discovered that they have disappeared An Army general is disconcerted by this turn of events, reflecting that "What he ordered to be locked up should have remained so, period. . .The absence of the crowd is nothing but a special form of presence, and what has changed is in essence of secondary importance. Since the refugees are no longer here, they must be somewhere else, that much is obvious" The refugees seem to be a consequence of a coup that has taken place somewhere amid the "sandy excavations" outside the square but that we know about only through the rumors circulating through the square and that may have been connected to a loud explosion heard earlier in the day.

The novel ends with a reverie about what may have happened to the refugees if they had managed to make it to "America." The narrator concludes:

Happy endings are never happier than is possible. It might seem that, like a springtime thaw, they bring the promise of a new beginning, but the truth is otherwise. They merely lay bare the rotting matter of dashed hopes. Fortunate turns of events bring no relief, consumed as they are by the mold of unintentionally ironic meanings, and shot through with the musty despair of past seasons. And it is from them, these endings which end nothing, that new stories will grow.

One senses that the next day on this (presumably) East European square would unfold much like the day the novel has related, if not in detail then certainly in essence. That the novel has managed to convey this essence is perhaps a mark of its "success," but Flaw also seems to suggest that representing a bare essence of human existence is the best that fiction can do. By dramatizing the seat-of-the-pants process by which fiction is composed, highlighting the conventional signals of "setting" or "character" that guide our reading of fiction, disclosing the extent to which fiction is the active struggle to incorporate reality within an aesthetic scheme, not a completed account of reality, Flaw exposes the "flaw" in thinking that fiction can be a seamless represention of the real. It is artifice all the way down, and it does no justice, either to fiction or to the reality it seeks to encompass, to deny that fact.

Ultimately the true success of Flaw is its dynamic--I would even say entertaining--performance of this internal drama about the act of fiction-making.

ADDENDUM Archipelago Books has without question become an indispensable source of translated fiction, but I wonder whether it would be possible to include with its volumes a preface or critical introduction, presumably by a scholar or critic familiar with the author's work and/or with that author's national literature. Such an introduction might be especially useful for readers curious about a writer like Tulli but who really have no context within which to place her work. In lieu of that, this interview with the translator of Flaw is available.